Deeplinks

Today, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino admitted that the defendants in the lawsuits against telecommunications carriers "certainly helped us," marking the first time the White House has admitted that the particular companies alleged to have participated in the wiretapping did indeed participate.

Despite the strong leadership of senators like Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold, the Senate passed the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), failing to strip telecom immunity from a terrible surveillance bill. The Dodd-Feingold amendment to remove immunity from the FAA failed in a 31 to 67 vote (51 votes were needed), and the FAA passed 68 to 29.

Since late last week, the Republican National Committee (RNC) has been circulating a comically lame political advertisement around Capitol Hill. Since the ad isn't actually running on TV anywhere, the message is clearly to members of Congress and their staff: "If you don't do as Bush says on the issue of telecom immunity, this is the kind of ad we will run against you in your home district in November."

As if it weren't bad enough that the RIAA's lawsuits against file-sharers are futile, unfair, and immoral [PDF], they are also beginning to distort the law. In many of these cases, the recording industry is urging judges to accept controversial legal theories on the way to busting file sharers. It's not clear whether this is a tactical effort to cut legal corners to save money, or a strategic effort to build lower court precedents for use in other cases. Either way, these are frequently extremely unfair fights (such as in Atlantic v. Howell, where the defendant can't even afford a lawyer), and thus bad vehicles for making controversial new law. The judges simply aren't hearing both sides.

"Spies' Battleground Turns Virtual," proclaims a headline in Wednesday's Washington Post. The headline alone would raise concerns — after decades of electronic surveillance, what exactly is it about US spies' work that has suddenly turned virtual? But this turns out to be only the first of the many falsehoods, baseless assertions and lame misperceptions that comprise the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity's new fearmongering paper on the dangers of unmonitored civillian communication.

Last March, the ACLU of the National Capital Area and EFF joined forces to defend Dorothy Brizill, Gary Imhoff, and their good-government watchdog organization DCWatch in a lawsuit filed by former DC city employee Roslyn Johnson. The suit was a response to a series of articles written by DC journalist Jonetta Rose Barras about the city's Department of Parks and Recreation. Citing information released from the city through the DC Freedom of Information Act, among other sources, Barras’ reports contended that Johnson had been hired on the basis of an enhanced resume and was being paid an inflated salary.